Mining And Quarrying In Neolithic Europe

The social processes involved in acquiring flint and stone in the Neolithic began to be considered over thirty years ago, promoting a more dynamic view of past extraction processes. Whether by quarrying, mining or surface retrieval, the geographic source locations of raw materials and their resultant archaeological sites have been approached from different methodological and theoretical perspectives. In recent years this has included the exploration of previously undiscovered sites, refined radiocarbon dating, comparative ethnographic analysis and novel analytical approaches to stone tool manufacture and provenancing. The aim of this volume in the Neolithic Studies Group Papers is to explore these new findings on extraction sites and their products. How did the acquisition of raw materials fit into other aspects of Neolithic life and social networks? How did these activities merge in creating material items that underpinned cosmology, status and identity? What are the geographic similarities, constraints and variables between the various raw materials, and how does the practise of stone extraction in the UK relate to wider extractive traditions in northwestern Europe? Eight papers address these questions and act as a useful overview of the current state of research on the topic.

Edited by Pierre Allard, Françoise Bostyn, François Giligny and Jacek Lech This book includes papers from the Flint Mining in Prehistoric Europe session held at European Association of Archaeologists 12th Annual Meeting Cracow, Poland, 19th-24th September 2006.

This volume offers a review of major flint mines dating from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. The 18 articles were contributed by archaeologists from Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden, using the same framework to propose a uniform view of the mining phenomenon.

Based on a meeting on prehistoric mines and quarries held at the Society for American Aracheology Annual Symposium in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2006, this title includes the papers that explore a range of issues relating to prehistoric extraction sites, including ethnography, geochemical signatures, excavation, and conservation.

This book focuses on the introduction of Neolithic extraction practices across Europe through to the Atlantic periphery of Britain and Ireland. The key research questions are when and why were these practices adopted and what role did extraction sites play in Neolithic society. Neolithic mines and quarries have frequently been seen as fulfilling roles linked to the expansion of the Neolithic economy. However, this ignores the fact that many communities chose to selectively dig for certain types of stone in preference to others and why the products from these sites were generally deposited in special places such as wetlands. To address this question, 168 near-global ethnographic studies were analyzed to identify common trends in traditional extraction practices to produce robust statistics about their motivations and material signatures. Repeated associations emerged between storied locations, the organization of extraction practices, long-distance distribution of products, and the material evidence such activities left behind. This suggests that we can now probably identify mythologized/storied sites, seasonality, ritualized extraction, and the use-life of extraction site products. The ethnographic model was tested against data from 223 near-global archaeological extraction sites, which confirmed a similar patterning in both material records. It was used to analyze the social context of 79 Neolithic flint mine and 51 axe quarry excavations in Britain and Ireland and to review their European origins. The evidence that emerges confirms the pivotal role played by Neolithic extraction practices in European Neolithization and that the interaction of indigenous foragers with migrant miners/farmers was fundamental to the adoption of the new agropastoral lifestyle.

One of the principal characteristics of the European Neolithic is the development of monumentality in association with innovations in material culture and changes in subsistence from hunting and gathering to farming and pastoralism. The papers in this volume discuss the latest insights into why monumental architecture became an integral part of early farming societies in Europe and beyond. One of the topics is how we define monuments and how our arguments and recent research on temporality impacts on our interpretation of the Neolithic period. Different interpretations of Göbekli Tepe are examples of this discussion as well as our understanding of special landmarks such as flint mines. The latest evidence on the economic and paleoenvironmental context, carbon 14 dates as well as analytical methods are employed in illuminating the emergence of monumentalism in Neolithic Europe. Studies are taking place on a macro and micro scale in areas as diverse as Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Germany, the Dutch wetlands, Portugal and Malta involving a range of monuments from long barrows and megalithic tombs to roundels and enclosures. Transformation from a natural to a built environment by monumentalizing part of the landscape is discussed as well as changes in megalithic architecture in relation to shifts in the social structure. An ethnographic study of megaliths in Nagaland discuss monument building as an act of social construction. Other studies look into the role of monuments as expressions of cosmology and active loci of ceremonial performances. Also, a couple of papers analyse the social processes in the transformation of society in the aftermath of the initial boom in monument construction and the related changes in subsistence and social structure in northern Europe. The aim of the publication is to explore different theories about the relationship between monumentality and the Neolithic way of life through these studies encompassing a wide range of types of monuments over vast areas of Europe and beyond.

This lavishly illustrated volume presents a state of the art survey of the ancient rock art of Britain and Ireland. Bringing together new discoveries and new interpretations, it enhances our understanding and further establishes ancient British and Irish rock art as a significant archaeological assemblage worthy of attention and additional study.

The Neolithic was a period of prolific activity for the South Downs in Sussex, when enclosures and monuments were being built, ditches cut, large areas cleared and flint was extracted from the ground. This study features one of the last, great unpublished excavation archives relating to fieldwork conducted on the Neolithic monuments of the South Downs, carried out by John Henry Pull in the 1920s-50s. It includes reports from four major areas of flint mining (Blackpatch, Church Hill, Cissbury and Tolmere), largely based on contemporary records and accounts, with comments and observations from Miles Russell. The specialist reports and studies of artefact assemblages are to be published in a separate report.